Skip to main content

Frame Six

 The first line of the poem Frame Six by Cheswayo Mphansa, lingered with me for days. 

"These days I wake in the used light of someone’s spent life."

There are degrees of sadness and despair in those words for me. It brought back memories of time thankfully long past where these words could have been exactly what I sought to describe what I was living through. I wrote about my nights in a cold attic many years ago. If I had the words Mphansa does, I would have expressed it more memorably and without wasting any. His poem reminded of a blog by young person describing the wisdom of having lived thirty years. Lot of good insights there but the last line is the best - the days are long but the decades are short. This gets truer the longer you live I think. 

Just like that the 20s and 30s are over and if you had not been spending those long days thinking about the larger purpose of your life, suddenly you are left with far less intangible resources than you once had. I spent my 20s waging wars that I felt were worth fighting at the time - not concerned as much about what I would have to show for it at the end of my life. The wars were won to my satisfaction and I was also worn out. In hindsight that energy could have been diverted to much better end and by when that epiphany occurred I was no longer the person I was in my 20s - I did not have any of that fight left in me. 

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...
Post a Comment
Read more